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Google To Build Quantum Information Processors
An anonymous reader writes The Google Quantum AI Team has announced that they're bringing in a team from the University of California at Santa Barbara to build quantum information processors within the company. "With an integrated hardware group the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture." Google will continue to work with D-Wave, but the UC Santa Barbara group brings its own areas of expertise with superconducting qubit arrays.
Their motivation, in this area and all of the other scattered stuff, like cars and drone delivery and rocket prizes and stuff is called, "R&D."
They aren't worried about foreseeable payback.
You can bet your ass they will stumble across some neat shit.
All that advertising stuff has given them deep pockets.
Bill Gates buys art and tries to fix hunger and poverty with his billions.
Google is more into implementing theoretical junk to see if there is something there or if there's something nearby.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Now we are proper fucked.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It's also a matter of diversification. Google has done well enough in online advertising that pushing much harder will just lead to an antitrust shitstorm.
Given that, they basically have three options:
1. Sit back, relax, and move as much profit as possible through the company until somebody eventually 'disrupts' them. This is pretty much risk free in the short term, and probably popular with some shareholders; but it's pretty fatalistic in the long term, and fatalism isn't a personality trait that Silicon Valley tends to cultivate.
2. Sit back, take profits from advertising business and invest them in a diversified portfolio and gradually morph into some sort of fund as amount invested grows and, sooner or later, advertising business suffers a setback and/or withers. Basically a variation on #1; but with the money remaining inside under management rather than being passed through. Similarly fatalistic and similarly culturally unlikely.
3. Take profits from core business, attempt to invent the future before somebody else does, and crushes you. Not necessarily a better strategy than #1 or #2 (it might be; but it is a high risk/high reward type of thing); but a far better cultural fit than just sitting back and stashing the profits and accepting that eventually things change.
Highly unlikely. This is a hard, and possibly unsolvable problem. One small team within Google is not going to do better than 25 years of so-far failed Quantum Computing research.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah, until it sends a terminator back in time to kill a certain "John Connor"!
Life is not for the lazy.
used to be ITT, Bell Labs, IBM and other such "mom and pop shops" did this massive investment in R glad to see it's being done now somewhere.
Yes, and they are throwing it at all kinds of ideas hoping something pays off big before it dawns on all the marketing folks that "Internet advertising" is practically worthless, and the market collapses.
Actually, the reason Google got so big was precisely because they were (and are) able prove to marketing folks that they were getting a lot of value from their Internet advertising. A big part of what makes Google so popular among advertisers is the tools that allow them to quantify with a fair degree of precision how many of the clicks they pay for translate into sales and of what amount. In the advertising space this was Google's big innovation: a way to overcome the problem implied by the marketing saw "I know that half of what I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". With Google's ads, advertisers (at least those selling online) can measure exactly how much return they're getting on their advertising investment, and use that to manage their online ad strategy. So... if it didn't have good ROI, it would already be dead.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but the stuff I work on has no direct relation to ads. My comments here are actually derived mostly from comments by businesspeople I know who operate online stores and use Google's ad services -- and love them.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"
-Isaac Newton